Good morning, and thank you, Stuart (Kerachsky of the Institute of Education Sciences [IES]), so much for that nice introduction.

I also want to say thank you to Sue Betka for her
leadership at IES as well as to the entire career staff.
Sue has been so helpful during this transition. I know
that she'll continue to be a great, great resource for our
new director, and let's give John Easton a big round of
applause. Let's hear it for John.

As everyone knows, John Easton is a colleague for
whom I have tremendous respect. I feel so fortunate
that we're going to be able to continue to work
together. The Chicago Consortium on School Research
enjoys an independent relationship with the Chicago
Public Schools similar to that of IES with the
Department of Education.

John always told us the cold, hard truth without regard to ideology or politics. And so many of our most important reforms in Chicago were a direct result of
work and data produced by the Consortium—the idea
of ending social promotions, keeping our freshmen on
track and trying to dramatically raise graduation rates,
tracking college enrollment, developing growth models and thinking very differently about how we turn around underperforming schools.

The common denominator for all of these policy
decisions was that they were informed by data. I am a
deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions.
Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where
we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk.

There's a lot I don't like about No Child Left Behind
(NCLB) , but I will always give it credit for exposing
our nation's dreadful achievement gaps. It changed
American education forever and forced us to take
responsibility for every single child, regardless of race,
background, or ability. And this is just one example of
how data affects policy and there are many, many more.

I'm actually thrilled to have a leader like John working
with us here in Washington and I'm absolutely
committed to relying on high-quality, independent
research funded by IES to inform our thinking.

So thank you, John, for coming to Washington and
agreeing to serve, and thank you, Sue, as well as the
entire career staff, for your extraordinary service.

I want to begin this morning by talking about the
historic opportunity we have today. We will never have a chance like this again. We have a president who is
passionate about public education. He and his wife were
not born with silver spoons in their mouths. They are
who they are because they worked so hard and because
they got a great education.

We have absolute bipartisan leadership on the Hill
that sees the need and the opportunity for us to get
dramatically better. We have more proven strategies
out in school districts around the country–rich, poor,
rural, urban, suburban. We have had this flourishing of
innovation and entrepreneurial ideas over the past 10,
15 years. We've never had so many examples of success
before.

And thanks to the Recovery Act, we also have some
money, and money does matter. Over $100 billion in
new resources is coming to education. It would have
been unimaginable just a few months ago to think
about that.

And the Recovery Act focuses on four broad areas of
reform. We're convinced that with unprecedented
resources must come unprecedented reform. Just simply
investing in the status quo isn't going to get us where we
need to go.

We're focused on college– and career–ready
internationally benchmarked standards. We have many
states, as you know, voluntarily moving in that direction.
We're thinking a lot about teacher quality–great talent
matters tremendously, as does how we attract and attain
the best and brightest teachers and principals in our
business and how we get them to work in some of our
toughest schools.

We're thinking about turning around schools. If we
were to take–we have about 100,000 schools in our
country–if we were to take the bottom 1 percent each
year, the bottom thousand, and year after year turn them
around, over the next four or five or six years, we could
basically eliminate those drop–out factories from our
nation.

Today's speech is the first in a series of policy speeches
around those four assurances, leading up to the Race to
the Top and the Invest in What Works and Innovation
grants that will be coming soon.

Race to the Top and Invest in What Works and
Innovation funding provides $5 billion in discretionary
money. I was talking to Secretary Paige recently. I think
he had $17 million. We have $5 billion. Think about the
opportunity we have to make a difference.

The time frame now, the rough time frame is to have
draft applications out in July, final applications out
by October, and then to get grants out to states and
districts by February.

Today, of course, I want to focus on data and I'm
blessed to have an audience that knows what I mean
when I use words like regression models and effect size
indicators. While these words may have meaning for
all of you, as you know, they have very little meaning to
the general public. And one of our collective challenges
is to talk about data and research in ways that people
understand. That's one of John's tremendous gifts–to
take complicated ideas and make them understandable.
That is the only way that good ideas can lead to action
and not just remain on a shelf somewhere.

People need to get it and they need
to be part of the cause of public
education. And that means they need to
understand data.

When we did our first turnaround schools in Chicago,
in which we closed and reopened the schools with the
same children but with new adults, the saddest part of
it was that so many parents had no idea how far behind
their schools were. They didn't know that they were the
worst schools in the city and, in fact, had been like that
for years. They thought they were just like everyone else.

And part of the problem is that people don't know how
to read data, how to sift through it or understand it
and that's really a challenge for all of us. This is just an
insider conversation, but it affects everyone outside of
this club: parents, children, taxpayers, and employers.
And the stakes have never been higher. We must
tell the truth and we must tell it clearly. We cannot
communicate an undecipherable code.

In the months and years ahead, we will ask thousands
of communities across America to close and
reopen schools based on data showing that they are underperforming.
That has never happened before
and it will be as difficult as it is important. It will
change and improve the life chances of children from
underserved communities forever.

We will ask millions of teachers to use student
achievement and annual growth to drive instruction
and evaluation. Parents need to understand that. We
ask elected officials in states across America to embrace
higher standards even though the initial data for their
states may reflect badly on them and their schools. This
will take real political courage with short–term pain
leading to long–term gain.

Clearly, this is a lot to ask of people. It is our
responsibility to make this experience as safe and
comfortable for people as possible. People need to
get it and they need to be part of the cause of public
education. And that means they need to understand
data.

Data may not tell us the whole truth, but it certainly
doesn't lie. So what is the data telling us today? It tells
us that something like 30 percent of our children, our
students are not finishing high school. It tells us that
many adults who do graduate go on to college but
need remedial education. They're receiving high school
diplomas, but they are not ready for college.

I saw a figure in the paper the other day that talked
about a million students a year spending their Pell
Grants on courses that don't give them college credit.
This is why we need higher standards. When states
lower standards, they are lying to children and they
are lying to parents. Those standards don't prepare our
students for the world of college or the world of work.

When we match NAEP (National Assessment of
Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's
Report Card) scores and state tests, we see the
difference. Some states, like Massachusetts, compare
very well. Unfortunately, the disparities between most
state tests and NAEP results are staggeringly large.

This is one of the significant problems of NCLB. It let
every state set its own bar and we now have 50 states,
50 different states all measuring success differently,
and that's starting to change. We want to flip that. We
want to set a high bar for the entire country against
states' and districts' ability to create and hit that higher
bar, give them the chance to innovate and hold them
accountable for results.

Through the Council of Chief State School Officers,
46 states and three territories have agreed to work
on a common core of internationally benchmarked
standards. This is just a first step, but it is a huge step in
the right direction.

We absolutely support that work because we know
from the data that the Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)
study that America has stagnated educationally as the
rest of the world has progressed and in too many places
passed us by.

We're competing with children from around the globe
for jobs of the future. It's no longer the next state or the
next region. It's India, China, South Korea, and Finland.

I was on Capitol Hill the other day and faced questions
over how much recovery money was going to save jobs
and how much was going to advance reform. I told
them that in the long run reform is all about jobs. We
have to educate our way to a better economy.

Yes, we have to keep teachers in the classroom and we
have distributed enough money through recovery to
save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs
around the country. But if that's all we do, then we'll
miss an opportunity. The status quo today is simply not
good enough. No one should be satisfied.

Now, we know the news isn't all bad, of course. We also
know that children of all age groups across the country
have improved their performance in reading and that
younger students are posting strong gains in math.
We know that achievement gaps are narrowing at the
elementary school level.

We also know that college enrollment has increased for
students at all income levels. And that the enrollment
gap between students from low– and high–income
families has shrunk by almost half. That means that
more disadvantaged students have access to college,
which is extremely encouraging as more and more of
today's jobs in a competitive, global economy require
postsecondary education.

With enrollment in our K–to–12 public schools rising
to all–time highs, we know challenges remain in
educating a population that is growing, as we all know,
but becoming increasingly diverse. The results from
the long–term NAEP show that we have a lot of work
left to do, particularly in raising the achievement of our
students at the secondary school level, whose test scores
have barely moved over the past three decades.

This is what we mean by transparency and absolute
commitment to exposing the good, the bad, and the ugly
about our current state of education.

I need your collective help to drive a national
conversation that is above partisan policy disputes,
beyond wars on math and reading, and instead focuses
on the facts. We need to reach some agreements. We
can't keep studying things without arriving at some
commonly accepted conclusions.

President Truman once lamented the fact that every
economist he spoke to would always say, “On the one
hand things might get better, and on the other hand,
things might not.” Truman finally concluded that if
he wanted to find definitive advice on the economy, he
was going to have to start finding some one–handed
economists.

To some extent, the education community suffers
from that same dynamic. For every study showing
the benefits of the policy, there's another one with a
different conclusion. Quite often people draw different
conclusions from the same study and that's where we
need to separate ideology from analysis.

I recently spoke to education writers about the search for
truth in education. I challenged them to go beyond the
ideological statements and the surface conclusions and
find out what is really happening for our children in our
classrooms.

It's kind of like the debate around charter schools.
Advocates say they outperform traditional schools.
Opponents say they don't. The plain facts show that
some charter schools do, and some of them don't. But
rather than acknowledge the obvious, we devolve into an
ideology debate and somehow forget that this is about
children and learning. If something helps children, let's
do it.

That's where all of you come in with the research and
the facts. Education reform is not about sweeping
mandates or grand gestures. It's about systematically
examining and learning and building on what we're
doing right and scrapping what hasn't worked for our
children.

IES and its grantees are uniquely able to contribute to
this effort. You are staffed with world–class researchers
and skilled statisticians. You have high standards
both for evaluating program effectiveness and for the
publications you produce. I want to tell you what we're
doing to support data–driven instruction and research.

In addition to $250 million in the Recovery Act for
statewide data systems, we have requested nearly $690
million for IES' activities, an increase of more than $70
million from last year's budget.

Among other things, that money will pay for a
longitudinal study of teachers and an international
assessment of adult competencies. We will also launch
a national survey to examine the participation of our
youngest learners in preschool as well as the levels of
parent and family involvement in education.

We will also focus on data in our Race to the Top and
Invest in What Works and Innovation applications.
While the applications are still under construction, we
are developing questions around how teachers are using
data to drive instruction. Many teachers are hungering
for data to inform what they do.

Our best teachers today are using real–time data in ways
that would have been unimaginable just five years ago.

They need to know how well their students are
performing. They want to know exactly what they need
to do to teach and how to teach. It makes their job
easier and ultimately much more rewarding. They aren't
guessing or talking in generalities anymore. They feel as
if they're starting to crack the code.

We will also ask whether the data around student
achievement is linked to teacher effectiveness. Believe it
or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin,
and California, have laws that create a firewall between
students and teacher data. Think about that: Laws that
prohibit us from connecting children to the adults who
teach them.

Usually, firewalls are set up for our protection. They
prevent hackers from getting into our computers and
they block our children from visiting inappropriate
Web sites. But these state firewalls don't help us. They
hurt all of us. They impede our ability to serve students
and better understand how we can improve American
education.

I brought this up in a meeting in California two weeks
ago and a local union leader said the following: “Gather
data so you can decide who the good teachers are?
Wrong. We need more data, but not to use it as a basis
for teachers' pay.”

Now I absolutely respect the concerns of teachers
that test scores alone should never be used solely
to determine salaries. I absolutely agree with that
sentiment. I also appreciate that growth models as they
exist today are far less than perfect. We have a lot of
work still ahead of us.

But to somehow suggest that we should not link student
achievement and teacher effectiveness is like suggesting
we judge a sports team without looking at the box score.

It's like saying, since standardized tests are not perfect,
eliminate testing until they are. I think that's simply
ridiculous. We need to monitor progress. We need to
know what is and is not working and why.

Hopefully, some day, we can track
children from preschool to high school
and from high school to college and
college to career. We must track highgrowth
children in classrooms to their
great teachers and great teachers to
their schools of education.

In California, they have 300,000 teachers. If you took
the top 10 percent, they have 30,000 of the best teachers
in the world. If you took the bottom 10 percent, they
have 30,000 teachers that should probably find another
profession, yet no one in California can tell you which
teacher is in which category. Something is wrong with
that picture.

I know that many forward-thinking educators share
this view and I am confident that, with your help and
your thoughtful work, we can overcome the legitimate
concerns of teachers that they are being judged merely
on test scores.

We began a pay-for-performance program in Chicago
that was designed by 25 of our city's best teachers. It
rewards not just individual teachers but entire schools
and includes several factors well beyond test scores.

It's too early to see real results about pay-forperformance
initiatives. There aren't a lot of studies
showing it boosts student achievement, but there is
plenty of evidence that it boosts worker productivity in
other industries, so why shouldn't we try it? Over time,
you collectively will tell us whether it's working.

We will also push states to make data available to
researchers. Of course, we realize student privacy
is a real concern. But there are solutions. We can
assign student identifiers to connect databases in
school systems. Universities, researchers and other
nongovernmental third parties can strip out personally
identifiable information from those databases.

And, hopefully, some day, we can track children from
preschool to high school and from high school to
college and college to career. We must track highgrowth
children in classrooms to their great teachers
and great teachers to their schools of education.

Which schools of education are producing the teachers
that produce the students that improve the most year
after year? We need to know that answer.

We can one day do a better job of understanding what
makes great teachers tick, why they succeed, why they
stay in the classroom and how others can be like them.
Hopefully, we can track good programs to higher test
scores to higher graduation rates. Hopefully, one day we
can look a child in the eye at the age of eight or nine
or 10 and say, “You are on track to be accepted and to
succeed in a competitive university and, if you keep
working hard, you will absolutely get there.”

Today, many states are well along the path to having
good data systems. Today, nearly every district has an
information system that stores data about students, and
more teachers have access to these systems than ever
before.

In Garden Grove, California, teachers administer
quarterly assessments aligned with California state
standards. Results are available the next day.

In Long Beach, teachers see benchmarked assessments,
attendance and behavior. They meet regularly together
to review data, monitor student progress, and plan
strategies for at-risk students. In addition, the high
school students monitor their own progress. How is that
for motivation? We need more and more districts using
this kind of technology to help them improve.

The Data Quality Campaign, DQC, lists 10 elements
of a good data system. Six states, Alabama, Arizona,
Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, and Utah, have all
10 elements. Other states are also making progress.
For example, Arkansas has a data warehouse that
integrates school fiscal information, teacher credentials,
and student coursework, assessments, and even
extracurricular activities.

The system has allowed for better student tracking to
enable the state to identify double-count enrollments
and is saving it more than $2 million in its first year.

We want to see more states build comprehensive
systems that track students from pre-K through college
and then link school data to workforce data. We want to
know whether Johnny participated in an early learning
program and completed college on time and whether
those things have any bearing on his earnings as an
adult.

Hopefully, one day we can look a
child in the eye at the age of eight or
nine or 10 and say, “You are on track
to be accepted and to succeed in a
competitive university and, if you keep
working hard, you will absolutely
get there.”

There's so much opportunity for growth and progress
in this area. We have the money and we have the
technology. The biggest barrier, the only remaining
barrier in my mind is whether we have the courage. It
takes courage to expose our weaknesses with a truly
transparent data system. It takes courage to admit our
flaws and take steps to address them.

It takes courage to always do the right thing by our
children, but ultimately we all answer to the truth. You
can dance around it for only so long. America's children
need your help. America's educators need your help,
and the president and I need your help. We don't have a
minute to waste.

Reforming public education is not just a moral
obligation. It is absolutely an economic imperative. It is
the foundation for a strong future and a strong society.
Education is the civil rights issue of our generation. The
fight for quality education is about so much more than
education. It's a fight for social justice. It is the only way
to achieve the quality that inspired our democracy, that
inspired women to stand up for their rights, and then
inspired minorities to demand their fair share of the
American promise, and it inspires every child to dream.

Those dreams are shaped in America's classrooms. They
are nurtured by the dedicated teachers and principals all
across America who do the hard work every single day
of educating our children. And they are counting on all
of you to help them get better, help them see how they
can improve, and help them turn their students' dreams
into reality.

So I thank you for all that you have done. I thank you in
advance for all that you will do. And thank you, above
all, for telling us the truth, for keeping us honest and
for showing us the path forward. We may never have an
opportunity like this again to transform the quality of
education in our country. Together, let's make the most
of it.